The Art of Murder
by anna-garny
Summary: As a beat cop in Manhattan, Kate Beckett pulled some strings for an up-and-coming FBI agent. When a murder she is investigating turns out to be linked to a series of high-profile art thefts, she calls in Special Agent Burke.
1. Chapter 1

"Peter, come on, you know that dead bodies aren't really my thing..." Neal was complaining as the Taurus came to a stop outside the four-story brownstone, Peter had pulled it in nose-first between a pair of blue-and-whites, slapped the FBI-issue ID card onto the dash and got out, ignoring Neal's protests as he badged his way through the crowd towards the yellow crime-scene tape blocking the front door.  
"Neal, the NYPD called, the murder's been linked to a series of high-profile art thefts, and I owe the investigating detective a favour."  
"How does the great Peter Burke become indebted to a lowly NYPD homicide detective?" Neal asked, sticking close to Peter as they climbed the stairs, following the M.E. staff towards the third floor.  
"You call Detective Beckett 'lowly' to her face and somehow survive, and I might tell you what she did for me to mean that I owe her a few favours."  
"A few favours?" Neal asked as Peter pushed open the door, a half-smile playing about the agent's features as Neal paused on the threshold, that 'will I run or will I stay' look that Peter was so familiar with in his eyes.  
"Detective Beckett, you rang?" Neal stepped into the room just as a dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties stood up from beside a body, smiling in greeting at Peter and snapping a pair of purple crime-scene gloves off in order to shake his hand.  
"Hey, Peter, great to see you. About the case..." Neal allowed the detective's voice to become as background noise while he surveyed the room, trying to look everywhere but the man on the carpet with the hole in his forehead, a pool of blood on the carpet beneath him. It didn't take him long to identify the only other person in the room who wasn't a cop.

Not with that haircut.

The guy in the green shirt, about Peter's age, wearing denim jeans and a dark blazer, was hovering over the M.E.'s shoulder, grinning like a kid in a candy shop as he pointed out something on the body, making the M.E. shake her head and swat his hand away. He wasn't a cop, and dressed like that, he wasn't part of the M.E.'s team, who the heck was he?

Neal picked his way across the room, careful not to step on or touch anything, keeping one eye on the guy in green as he did.

He noticed several things about the man as he got closer, for a start, he seemed comfortable around the body, an attitude reflected only in Detective Beckett and the M.E., everyone else looked at least marginally uncomfortable about the cadaver on the floor. He was familiar with procedures as well, a pair of purple gloves covering his hands as he examined the body, but still not touching anything. He managed to attract the detective's attention once she and Peter were done with their greeting, pointing to some marks on the corpse's neck and mentioning something about 'post-mortem bruising'. The detective looked at the M.E., who nodded in agreement, before thanking him and asking him to leave her crime scene.

The guy's grin was suddenly smug, and Neal's eyes narrowed in recognition- where had he seen that smile before?

He hadn't quite remembered when the man suddenly stood up, taking a step backwards and to his left, colliding heavily with Neal and sending the pair of them crashing to the carpet just inches from the edge of the pool of blood on the carpet.

"Castle!"  
"Caffrey!"  
"What?" They asked in unison, each addressing their respective handlers, then looking at each other, Castle still half on top of Neal, his elbow digging into Neal's ribs.  
"Castle? As in Richard Castle, the author?"  
"That's me, and you're Neal Caffrey, aren't you? Weren't you a wanted fugitive a few weeks ago?"  
"Oh, you saw that? I hate that picture." Neal muttered, thinking that it would be a great idea if this guy would get off him sometime soon.

As if he realised just how awkward the situation was becoming, Rick shifted, trying to get up and apparently failing, before Detective Beckett sighed and caught him by the wrist, hauling him to his feet with a stern look.

"You better not have contaminated my crime scene, Castle." The M.E. commented dryly, not looking up from the checklist on her clipboard. "Same goes for you, Mr Caffrey."  
"Ye of little faith." Neal muttered, glancing half-hopefully at Peter before realising that he was going to have to stand up under his own power and struggling to his feet.  
"Hey, don't glare at me, he knocked me over." Neal pointed at Castle, who was brushing himself off at a safe distance from the body, but paused when he realised that the conman was talking about him.  
"Hey, you snuck up on me!"  
"I was trying to get a closer look at a crime scene, and you didn't look around before you bashed into me." Neal countered, snatching his hat up off the floor and taking a step backwards so that Peter was between himself and Mr Castle.

Rick conceded with a grunt, nodding at Peter as if to admit defeat. Neal returned the hat to his head with a flourish, something akin to a smirk directed at Castle, making the writer do a double-take.

"Hey!" Castle exclaimed, and Peter spun around in time to see Neal straightening his hat with a rather over-zealous look of concentration. Peter caught him by the elbow and dragged him out of the room, past a pair of uniforms and into a neighbouring room.  
"Hey, you pull your head in, we're co-operating with the NYPD on this one, and Castle's riding along with Beckett thanks to a deal he struck with the Mayor, so he's in a slightly less precarious situation than you are. Play nice."  
"He knocked me over!"  
"He didn't do it on purpose, stop being so damn precious and get back in there- Beckett thinks that the painting over the fireplace is a forgery that's been put in place to cover the theft of the original, which happened right before the murder."

Neal stuck his bottom lip out for a moment, pouting a little, before Peter gave him the 'menacing' look that Neal himself had helped him perfect, and he admitted defeat.

"Fine, but for the record I do my best work alone."  
"Well you're going to have to be a second-best criminal for this one, because Castle's riding along with Kate, so he's coming with us."

Neal looked as if he'd been punched in the stomach, and it took Peter a moment to realise why.

"Ka-kate?" Neal asked, actually reaching out to grab Peter's shoulder to steady himself.  
"Oh, dammit, I didn't tell you, Detective Beckett's first name is Kate."  
"Oh, okay. Thanks for the heads up." Neal took a moment to gather himself, and in those few seconds Peter saw the vulnerable little boy that Neal became when he was under threat, the little boy in him that made Peter so determined to keep him out of prison, and on the straight and narrow.  
"You think you'll be okay?" Peter asked, seeing that haunted look in Neal's eyes that was uncomfortably familiar.  
"Yeah, I'll be fine. I'll be back in there soon, just give me a second."  
"Okay."

**A/N**

**Bitten by the plot bunny. I got 1200 words out and then went back to my NaNoWriMo... I wish that story was flowing as easily as this did! Any suggestions/ideas for direction are more than welcomed.**

**The rest of the respective teams will be seen in the next chapter, which is already half-written, but I've gotten stuck with Neal sitting in Castle's chair near Kate's desk and Esposito trying to chat Diana up... **


	2. Chapter 2

Neal skulked back into the room containing the dead body, keeping his eyes averted from the corpse on the carpet and instead concentrating on the task Peter had set him - determining if the painting above the fireplace was a fake. It only took a brief glance for Neal to recognise a few tell-tale signs that the portrait wasn't genuine, he was familiar enough with forgery techniques to spot the shorter brush-strokes and the too-sharp lines at the edge of the girls' face. He'd need to take a much closer look, of course, to be certain, but he told Peter what he thought, anyway.

"That's most likely a forgery, but I'd need to take a closer look to confirm."

"Can you tell who did it?"  
"Not from this distance, maybe when I have some of my equipment with me I could. If the person who did it is anything like me-"

"There might be a signature on it somewhere. Okay, Kate? Can we get that painting into evidence? Neal thinks it might be a fake."

Beckett looked up from her position next to Lanie, first glancing at the painting then raising an eyebrow at Neal.

"How can you tell? You're fifteen feet away from it."  
"Well, for a start, the red is far to vibrant for a painting that's supposedly a hundred and twenty years old. Even if it had been restored recently this particular piece spent the better part of two decades in a gallery uptown between 1968 and 1984, under fluorescent lights for ten hours a day."

"Huh." Castle looked over at Neal, his eyes narrowing as Kate gave him a rare smile, impressed, before ordering one of the CSU team-members to find an evidence bag big enough to hold the painting.

"Your place or mine?" Kate directed her question at Peter, who was nonplussed for a moment before finally realising that she wanted to know which office to send the painting to.

"Oh, well, uh-" Peter stammered for a moment, caught off-guard, before recovering. "Well, to maintain the chain of evidence, it should probably go back to your precinct. You've got a bigger team than I do and it's easier for me and Neal to relocate than for all of you to try and fit into the FBI."

Neal's head snapped up at the mention of his own name, he'd been immersed in the painting.

"What? Relocating where?"  
"For the moment, you and I will be working with Detective Beckett and her team out of her offices. No objections." Peter forestalled Neal as he opened his mouth to protest. "I'll get Diana to bring your bag of tricks over to the 12th this afternoon."

Neal pouted for a few moments, but knew it was futile to try and argue with Agent Burke when he made up his mind. Instead, he turned his attention to the rest of the artworks in the room, having lifted a pair of purple crime-scene gloves from a member of the CSU. He inspected each of the paintings in turn, carefully nudging those that were fakes so that they didn't hang straight while everyone else in the room concentrated on the body on the floor.

Peter, unused to dealing with cadavers since transferring into the White Collar unit, was hovering over Kate's shoulder as she conferred with Lanie, listening intently as Lanie outlined her preliminary findings, pointing out marks on the body and shooting the odd glare at Castle every time he interrupted her.

Neal was drawn away from his perusal of a small but exquisite Manet (that he couldn't determine the authenticity of) when he felt someone staring at him. He looked up and found himself staring into another pair of blue eyes - he was trying to place the man who was staring back at him when Javier Esposito approached his partner, nudging him.

"You know that guy?" He asked, indicating Neal as the con man resumed his examination of the painting hanging next to the kitchen door.

"I think so, I just can't figure out why." Ryan told his partner, narrowing his eyes at Neal.

"Isn't that the guy who jumped out of a judge's chambers and went on the run a few weeks ago? His face was all over the papers, no wonder you recognise him."  
"I know he did that-" Kevin said, irritated, "-but I feel like I know him from somewhere else."

"Ask him."

Kevin turned to face Javi, giving him a look that indicated to Esposito that he may have said the wrong thing.

"Okay, okay, or don't ask him, see if I care." Javier turned his attention back to his notebook, stepping away from Ryan, and as soon as he was immersed in his task, Neal stepped over to the Irish detective.

"You're Kevin Ryan." Neal said, having finally recognised the detective when he'd been glaring at his partner.

"You're Neal Caffrey. Why do I know you?"  
"Because I'm the best alleged art forger on the east coast?" Neal joked, giving Ryan one of his devastating-and-disarming smiles as he snapped the purple gloves off and stuffed them into his pants pocket.

As soon as Neal smiled, Kevin knew why he recognised him, and the glare returned in full force. Neal had been hoping to have at least a minute or so of pleasant conversation with the detective before he realised why they knew each other, but apparently his luck had run out.

"The last time I spoke to you you called yourself Nick... and you stole my girlfriend!"

"Hey, man, she came up to me."

"You flew her to Monaco!"  
"She wanted to see the grand prix, and I happened to have tickets."  
"SHE DUMPED ME IN AN E-MAIL! FROM A PRIVATE PLANE! IN YOUR NAME!" Kevin shouted, making everyone in the room look around.

For the second time in ten minutes, Peter caught Neal by the collar and dragged him out of the crime scene, while Esposito caught his partner by the shirt as he went to lunge at Neal, his face rapidly turning red. Neal could hear Beckett demanding to know what was going on as the door slammed shut and Peter tossed him bodily into the hall, making Neal's hat fall off his head again.

"Neal, what the hell was all that about?" Peter demanded as Neal regained his feet, at least having the decency to look a little abashed.

"I, uh, may have, quite a few years ago, um..." he drifted off then muttered something that Peter couldn't quite make out.

"What?" Peter demanded.

"I may have taken his girlfriend to Monaco on a private jet and she dumped him by sending an e-mail from the plane." Neal told him, speaking so fast that it took Peter a few seconds to decipher it, before raising an eyebrow at Neal.

"You stole his girlfriend? How long ago?"  
"Uh- it was before I met Kate... ten years?"

"And he's still sore about it?"  
"Uh, well..."  
"Neal? What else did you do?"

"It wasn't me, it was her! She sent him photos of us at the Monaco Grand Prix, but she sent them from my computer. He thought they were from me - from Nick Halden - and he was kind of pissed."

"Apparently he still is pissed. Get in there and fix this, we're working this case with these guys, I don't want you at each others' throats."

"Oh, c'mon Peter, this guy hates me."  
"So did Sara. She still dropped the charges, and didn't you two have lunch together the other day?"

"Fine, fine." Neal picked his hat up and spun it on one finger, opening to door a crack to see what kind of situation he'd be walking into.

Ryan was still in the kitchen, talking to his partner and Detective Beckett, while Castle was over near the door. Neal decided that he might need some inside information, so hissed at Rick to get his attention.

"Rick? Castle!"

Rick spun around to catch Neal's eye and slipped out into the hallway, closing the door quietly behind him and facing Neal with a smile, apparently impressed.

"You flew his girlfriend to Monaco on a private jet just to see the grand prix?" Castle asked.

"That was ten years ago, but yes, I did fly a young lady to Monaco to see the grand prix, and she may or may not have been dating Kevin Ryan at the same time." Neal was almost embarrassed, in spite of his many cons and scams, it was rare for one to come back and bite him like this, at least, in such an unexpected fashion.

"Nice." Rick was grinning and Neal found himself smiling back, until he caught Peter glaring at him over Rick's shoulder.

"I, uh, I guess I should go apologise, hey?"  
"You might want to give him some time to simmer down... maybe meet us up at the precinct? There'll be more witnesses there, at the least."

"That- that's not a bad idea." Neal conceded, before looking over at Peter, almost pleading.

"Okay, we'll meet you at the precinct." Peter told him. "Straight from here to the station-house, no pit-stops."  
"Yes, _dad_." Neal muttered, returning his hat to his head and leaving the hallway at top speed, Peter and Rick watching him as he rounded the corner to take the stairs, too impatient to wait for the elevator.


	3. Chapter 3

Neal sauntered through the elevator doors of the 12th Precinct, his hat half-covering one eye, and looked around for a moment before picking which desk was Kate's, making a beeline for it while keeping a lookout for Detective Ryan.

Neal had been sent to the precinct ahead of the rest of the FBI team after he'd been attempting to 'help' pack up some computers and equipment and had stood on Diana's foot, prompting a string of cursing from Diana and a few choice words from Peter when she dropped the box she had been carrying and it landed with an unpleasant 'crunch', indicating that whatever was inside may have been at least partially destroyed.

Peter had shouted at Neal to get the hell out of the office because he was being nothing but a nuisance, and told him to go and annoy the NYPD.

Neal took him at his word and caught a cab to the station-house, stepping out of it and making his way up to Homicide by doing what he did best- hiding in plain sight and looking like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

Arriving at Detective Beckett's desk Neal considered his options before choosing to sit in the spinning desk chair, clearly Kate's, settling in to wait for the rest of the team to arrive and killing some time by practicing sleight-of-hand moves with one of Kate's pens.

"Caffrey! What the hell are you doing?" Beckett had approached Neal from the break-room and he spun in the chair when she spoke, making the pen vanish with a flourish and grinning up at her.

"Peter sent me over." 

"Alone?" Kate raised an eyebrow at him, knowing that the precinct office was well outside the two-mile radius Neal had been allowed from his home on Riverside Drive.

"Hey, I'm in a police station, how much trouble can I get into. Besides-" He lifted his left foot to rest on the chair Castle had installed next to Beckett's desk, tugging at his pants leg to reveal his tracking anklet. "-he can see exactly where I've been, anyway."

Kate rolled her eyes and nudged his foot off the chair, taking a seat and slapping a case file onto the desk, flicking it open to show Neal some photographs of previous crime scenes that, after Neal's revelation of the multiple forgeries in the apartment that morning, were now suspected to be linked.

When Castle arrived half an hour later bearing two lattes, the case file was sitting, closed, on Kate's desk. Instead, Neal and Kate were standing not far from the desk, heads bent together over Neal's phone as he showed her something on the small screen. Rick walked towards them, frowning, and as he set the coffee down on Beckett's desk the frown deepened - Kate had just laughed at something Neal said... and it was a laugh that Rick had only heard once before.

"What's so funny?" He asked, butting in, deliberately putting himself into their space, trying to get a look at the screen.

Neal looked up at Kate and she shook her head. "Don't show him, he wouldn't get it. He'd probably just get mad." 

"Okay." Neal snapped the phone shut and dropped it into his pocket before Rick could object, and stepped around the writer to sit on Castle's chair, lifting one of the latte's out of the cupholder and popping the lid off.

"Hey!" Castle objected - that was his coffee!

"How come you only got two?" Neal asked, taking a sip.

"One for me, one for Beckett." Castle told him, eyes narrowed. "And that one was supposed to be mine." 

"Oops. Still want it?" Neal held the coffee out but Rick pulled a face and turned around, searching for Ryan and Esposito, determined to get rid of Neal before the end of the day - who the hell did that guy think he was, wearing that stupid hat, stealing Rick's coffee, making Beckett laugh like that...

Castle didn't even stop to think for a moment about his ex-wife-current-girlfriend and how she might react if she knew just how jealous Rick was of Kate laughing with another (younger) man and he certainly wasn't self-aware enough to recognise that he was jealous... he was convinced that he was just annoyed at Neal for taking his seat and his coffee.

Kate took her seat with a smile, watching Castle storm away towards the break room where the boys were messing around with the espresso machine, wondering what they'd say when Castle told them Neal had stolen his coffee.

She picked up her own latte and reopened the manila folder with the photos from the other murder scenes and began flicking through them, showing Neal the suspected forgeries and making notes as he looked at the artworks with a trained eye, unable to stop grinning as he separated possible forgeries from most-likely genuine artworks by looking at sometimes-grainy crime scene photos that more often than not didn't even capture the entire artwork.

When Peter arrived the photos had again been abandoned, this time spread out on the edge of Kate's desk, some of them separated into two piles (maybe fake and likely real) and the rest sort of scattered over the wooden surface. Neal and Kate were at the other end of the bullpen, standing behind Esposito while Castle and Ryan were a few feet away looking mutinous. They were all watching Javier's computer screen as Peter approached.

"Break in the case?" Peter asked, rounding the desk to see what was on the monitor.

"Security footage from the lobby of today's apartment building. We might have a lead." Esposito explained, pausing the footage on a man exiting the elevator at twenty minutes past midnight- Lanie had narrowed down the time-of-death window to sometime between ten and midnight, so far only four people had exited the building in that window. Three had been identified as other tenants, but the man on the screen was an unknown.

"Great. Where can we set up?" Peter directed the question at Kate and she grinned at him before leading him into an unoccupied office that was being used as a storage space.

"We can clear out these boxes if you need more room-" 

"It'll be fine, Kate, we won't take up too much space. Send Caffrey in here, can you?" 

"Sure thing." Kate went back to Esposito's desk to find Neal standing a little way apart from the other guys, messing with his phone while the three of them talked among themselves. Beckett couldn't entirely hide her smile when she saw the dark looks being thrown at Neal by first Ryan then Castle, and took a strange kind of pleasure in stepping over to Neal and making sure to address him in a low voice so that the boys couldn't hear her.

She rolled her eyes as they strained to try and listen without appearing too intrusive, and went back to her desk, contemplating just how easy it was to wind them all up.

Neal walked into the makeshift office space with a grin, which soon vanished when Peter glared at him.

"What?" Neal decided that being offended was probably his best defence. To his knowledge he hadn't done anything to warrant a glare like that one... at least, not in the last 48 hours.

"Go apologise to Detective Ryan." 

"What?"

"Do it. We have to work together, you two need to play nice." 

"Oh, come on, what are we, twelve?" 

"Apparently he's still sore about the whole stealing his girlfriend thing. Go apologise and make him feel better about it. Tell him she cheated on you, too." 

Neal scoffed at that. "Yeah, right."

"Well make something up and be friends. You and Sara get along okay, now, and she once pointed a loaded gun at you because she thought you were coming to kill her."

Neal had to concede that he had come back into a persons' good graces after doing many things much worse than stealing their girlfriend, so made up his mind to be, perhaps not best buddies, but definitely no longer an enemy of Kevin's by the end of the day.


	4. Chapter 4

Peter knew better than to ask *how* Neal had managed to get in good with Detective Ryan, he simply acknowledged that there was no longer tension between them and hoped that the harmony would last at least as long as the case did.

Diana had finished helping with the setup in the spare office and now the seven of them – Peter, Kate, Rick, Neal, Diana, Javier and Kevin – were standing at the murder board in the bullpen staring at it in silence while Kate wrote up the current timeline. Rick had barely been able to conceal his disappointment that Peter didn't have as much pull as Jordan Shaw had; no smart-boards for the White Collar unit but they did have a secure connection to the FBI database.

"So Lanie tells us that time of death was sometime between ten PM and midnight, she'll be able to narrow it down once she's had a chance to do an autopsy. This guy-" she taped up a still from the security footage, the unknown from the lobby, "-is our only lead so far. Unless you guys have something on these forgeries?"

Peter stepped forward and picked up two magnetic bulldog clips, attaching photos of the two men they had identified in the current forgery ring.

"These two have been linked to the series of thefts-and-replacements we've been following for six months. They've stolen at least ten to twelve million dollars worth of artwork that we know of – these are just the reported thefts where the owners of the works knew the paintings well enough to recognise a forgery, or there were clues that a break-in had occurred that tipped them off to the replacements. We're still trying to find a link between all of the victims but it's hard – they all worked in different parts of the city, all attended different churches, social events and only half of them have school-aged kids."

"The only link seems to be that they collect high-end art." Neal put in. "But we can't even connect the artworks that have been stolen; they range from pre-Renaissance portraits to one of Andy Warhol's original soup cans; purchased from all over the world through different auction houses, in a few cases from the artists themselves."

"Someone has eclectic taste." Diana commented.  
"Or a very particular set of buyers. Although, we can't seem to find any of the pieces – that's the strangest part... they've all just vanished into the void and don't seem to have been on-sold." Peter finished for her.

"Why the hell would someone be stealing works like this if not to sell them?" Ryan asked.

"Well, a few of the pieces I _allegedly_ stole have never turned up. Some thieves like to keep things for themselves. Either that or they've been fenced very quietly a long time after the initial disappearance. Sometimes you become aware that you've kicked over a few too many rocks and you're on someone's radar, so you go to ground. Other times the originals get sold as copies or reproductions so the actual owners are unaware that they've got two or three million dollars worth of art on their walls or in their entryway. It also affords the original thief an opportunity to steal the piece again without the new owners caring too much – people never insure reproductions and very rarely include them in itemised police reports."

Neal looked around the room at the gobsmacked police officers.

"Or so I've heard." he finished, taking a step back and attempting to blend into the background, suddenly uncomfortable being in the spotlight.

"Which do you think is more likely, Caffrey?" Beckett asked, stepping around Peter to look at him properly.

The rest of the team turned and looked at him as he tried to turn into a chameleon, pressing himself against the brick wall and glancing from person to person like a rabbit in a trap, before taking a deep breath and responding, shoulders slumping.

"I don't know. I'd need to know more about a potential suspect to tell you what they're more likely to have done. Who wants coffee?" He sidestepped neatly around Diana and headed for the break-room, leaving a small crowd of law enforcement officers to scratch their heads and consider their options.

..

..

..

Beckett was staring at the murder board, having entrusted a couple of leads to Peter, Diana, Ryan and Esposito. Rick had wandered off somewhere, presumably looking for lunch, leaving Beckett alone in the bullpen – or so she thought.

"Cream, no sugar?" Neal asked, appearing at her shoulder and making Kate jump so high she almost upset the two cups Neal was carrying.

"Damn! How do you *do*that?" she demanded, one hand on her throat and the other on her gun.  
"Practice. Lots and lots of practice, plus expensive shoes. Coffee?"  
"Thanks, Caffrey."  
"Any ideas yet, detective?"  
"We've got a couple of leads, Peter and Diana are checking a few things back at the Bureau and my boys are following up with a couple of witnesses back at the scene."  
"What about the writer?"  
"Castle?"  
"Yeah, ever since he got back here he's been hovering around you and glaring at me every time I talk to you. What's going on with you two?"  
"With me and Castle? No, nothing's going on."  
"So he won't decapitate me if I take you to dinner?"  
"He won't, but Peter might."  
"Who says Peter has to know?" Neal took a sip from his own espresso and watched as Kate weighed her options.

"That tracking anklet says that Peter will know."  
"Yes, because he can see who I'm with and I never go to a decent restaurant by myself." Neal said, practically dripping sarcasm.

Kate rolled her eyes.

"You know, you might be charming, Caffrey, but you're still a criminal. I don't date criminals."  
"Dinner is not a date in and of itself, Kate."  
"It's Detective Beckett to you, Caffrey, and I'm going to have to decline."

Neal smiled, shaking his head slightly, but let the subject drop and turned his attention to the murder board.

"Who are Kevin and... Javier, was it?" Kate nodded, "Who were they interviewing?"  
"I asked them to backtrack on a couple of burglary cases – Esposito called a friend of ours down in Burglary and he'll be up here in a minute with some case files for you to have a look at – Demming said he's got some art thefts that might be linked."

Neal looked at her again, just from the corner of his eye, contemplating the manner of her refusal when a tall, dark man suddenly entered his field of vision and Kate looked up at him. Neal decided he should probably pay attention to this guy.

"Demming, hey. What have we got?" Neal watched Kate's reaction to him closely. There was definitely history there, Demming was far too casual as he leaned on Kate's desk, but Beckett was less than inviting in her body language towards him.

"I've found another dozen burglaries where high-end art was present but not stolen."  
"Have you got crime-scene photos?" Kate asked.  
"Sure, here." He handed her a sheaf of manila folders, half of which Kate passed to Neal without a second glance.  
"Here, Neal, take a look and see if you can spot any forgeries."  
"Oh, are you the art expert?" Demming held out a hand to greet Neal.  
"In a manner of speaking. Neal Caffrey."  
"Tom Demming. So you can pick fakes from photos?"  
"Sometimes, depends on the quality. From what I can tell, though, most of the forgeries planted during these break-ins aren't exactly museum-quality. They're good, but wouldn't fool an appraiser."  
"Interesting. Well, if you've got any tips for my team it might help. Give me a call if you need any more information about any of the cases. See you later, Kate."

Neal watched as Beckett flinched ever-so-slightly at the use of her first name, before giving Demming a strained smile and turning her attention to her stack of case files as he left.

"Want these added to the piles?" Neal asked, flicking through the photos in the top case file.  
"Forgeries in this pile, non-forgeries in that one." Kate indicated with her elbow, her attention flicking between the case files in her hands and the pictures on the murder board.

"Hang on – we might have an earlier connection." Kate pulled the top sheet out of the second case file in her collection and held it up next to the top sheet from their murder. "This woman was robbed two years ago."  
"What? Why didn't we make the connection?" Neal asked, looking at the sheets and not seeing the connection straight away.  
"Because she-" Kate pointed to the wife of the man who had been found dead that morning, "-changed her name when she got married last year, and moved from Harlem to the Upper East Side."  
"So she was robbed two years ago – did she own the painting, then?"  
"It doesn't seem likely, from the address I'd guess that the painting is worth more than the apartment she was living in at the time."  
"What about her husband? How long has he owned it?"  
"According to this... he bought it just before they got married, and before the wedding he lived in a studio in Chinatown."  
"So where did the money for a five-bedroom on East73rd come from?" Neal mused.  
"You're the criminal, you tell me."  
"Hey, I was good, but I never had an apartment with a private balcony, hell I never lived in a building with an elevator. Real estate purchases attract too much attention, and trying to rent without a real income can be... difficult. Not a lot of landlords will accept every single rental payment in cash, and certainly not the higher end places."

Kate nodded as he spoke, and made a few notes on the murder board as he did.

"Looks like we've got a few more leads to follow – I suppose I need to call his wife in."


	5. Chapter 5

"So, we're bringing her in to ask how the heck she afforded such an upgrade in housing? Can't we just check her financial records?" Neal asked Kate as she sifted through her manila folder, looking for the contact information of the dead man's widow.  
"Espositio's already onto that, but I want to talk to her about her previous robbery, too. Then, of course, there's that guy." Kate gestured towards the unknown man in the lobby surveillance still image.

"Oh, well. Yeah. What about the service entrance? The stairwells?" Neal decided that he liked poking holes in Beckett's theories, not least because she took it with better grace than Peter did.  
"Well, that's a consideration. The CSU team is still at the scene."

"Where is Mrs Peterson? She wasn't at the scene, this morning?" Peter asked. He and Neal had arrived a good hour after Beckett and her team; there was a strong possibility that Kate had already spoken to her earlier that day.  
"No, damn. From the looks of the report from the uniform who attended the scene first… she called her lawyer before she even called the police after she found her husband dead in their dining room. Brooks, Anderson and James beat us to the scene, even. They barely let her tell us her name before they whipped her away to their offices. Damn, this is going to be harder than I thought."  
"That's…" Peter wasn't sure how to categorize that action.  
"Odd, yes, but not totally unusual for someone with this much at stake. Realistically, she's our prime suspect."  
"So, we'll have to go to her?" Neal lit up at this prospect. He knew that Brooks, Anderson and James' main office was somewhere in Tribeca, and he hadn't been outside the Financial District in what felt like years.

"Detective Beckett and I will be going to speak with her while Diana has a look at the case files from her last fine art robbery. You are going down to help the CSU team decide exactly who it was that forged the painting Mr Peterson was found dead under."

"Castle, you're with Ryan, you two are checking out our case file of the last robbery, and if there's nothing useful there, then you're heading over to the White Collar unit to take a look at what Diana can dig up.

"Oh, come on, can't I ride along and help interview the wife?"  
"Castle, a homicide detective and an FBI agent will be intimidating enough. Stick with Ryan, today, okay?"

"Yeah, sure. We're still on for lunch, though."

"Yeah, yeah." Kate dismissed him with a wave of her hand and after a few seconds Rick left the murder board and joined Ryan at the elevator, heading for the records room.

Neal still hadn't left Peter's elbow, and for good reason.

"Can I get a ride to the CSU office?"  
"What?" Peter was distracted looking at the murder board.

"Well, if you're heading for Tribeca, you'll have to go right past One Police Plaza to get there."

"Yeah, sure."

"Well? Are we taking the Taurus or what?" Neal had noticed that Peter wasn't quite as prickly as usual; perhaps it was Detective Beckett's calming influence?

"I'll take him, Peter, you take Diana back to the Federal Building so she can find the case notes about that Warhol theft back when Mrs Peterson was still Miss Guillermo." Kate volunteered, and Neal brightened up.

Maybe Detective Beckett wasn't as violently objectionable towards criminals as she made out… she was used to dealing with cold-blooded killers. Perhaps he could convince her that white-collar criminals were easier on the conscience.

"Come on, Caffrey, I want to see how long it takes Lanie to pull you down a peg or two."

Neal picked up his hat and deposited the pens and stapler he had been messing with onto Kate's blotter, caught the toolbox Diana had delivered to him from the FBI office and followed the detective towards the elevator.

They had just stepped into the underground parking garage when Kate's phone began to ring, and Neal tactfully stepped away, giving her the illusion of privacy as she answered the call.

"Prints matched? In the stairwell? Whose? Oh, yeah, you can disregard those… no, he's a CI with the Feds, helping with the case, actually. Yes, I promise. Look, Lanie, I'll be there in half an hour with the man himself, he can explain how his prints got onto the emergency exit door-handle. You met him this morning, the guy with the hat? Yeah, him. No, Lanie, just… no. See you in half an hour."

"Anything I should know?"  
"Just that Lanie thinks you contaminated the crime scene. The emergency exit door-handle had been totally wiped clean, except for an almost-perfect set of prints belonging to one Neal Caffrey, an ex-con who spent four years in prison."

"Well, I did take the stairs when I left…"  
"Get in the car." Kate told him, feeling the all-too-familiar exasperation of working with an untrained partner. Admittedly, Castle was better at not touching things than Caffrey apparently was, but for this case, at least, it seemed that a man who specialized in forging artworks would be more useful than a fiction writer.  
"Which one?" Neal turned to face the long row of nondescript black Crown Vics, and Kate pressed the unlock button on her keys.

"The one with the flashing lights."

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"So you're the one who contaminated my crime scene?" Lanie demanded as Kate let Neal into the lab.

"Unintentionally, I promise. But I'm here to make up for it, I even bought my own tools." He hefted his box of tricks and Lanie pointed behind her to where the painting was leaning against the wall, still wrapped in its' evidence bag.

"You'll have to stay with him, Kate, chain of evidence and all that, I've got to get down to Autopsy."

"What? I'm supposed to meet Agent Burke in Tribeca."  
"I'm serious, there was an investigator from that law firm, Brooks and something? Down here before, sniffing around. I'd rather get the autopsy done as quickly as possible, I still have no idea how he even got down here without a badge. I need you to keep everything on the up and up so they don't get anything over on us."

"Sounds like a typical P.I., conning his way into somewhere off-limits and looking for loopholes. I better call Peter."

"I thought it was C.I.'s who did that?" Neal asked, having moved away from the ladies to take a closer look at the painting.

Beckett rolled her eyes at Lanie, who just shot her friend a suggestive smile before high-tailing it out of the lab she'd ushered them into.

Kate made a quick phone call to Peter, who understood the situation and told Kate he'd head back to the Bureau with Diana until she was free, it would be better if they interviewed the widow together, so that she was only questioned once. When she was done, Kate turned to see what Neal was up to, and found him looking at the painting, stretching the plastic to try and get a better view, but not taking it out of the evidence bag. At least he had some respect for the chain of evidence, Kate thought, as she approached him.

"Okay, so, what do you need, Neal?"

"More light, for a start. Why are all evidence rooms and labs so badly lit?"

"Something to do with being in basements. Hang on." Kate found the lighting controls and began to adjust them, turning the fluorescents up until the room almost looked naturally lit.

"Okay, that's great. Now, Lanie, was it? She mentioned something about chain of evidence. I'm guessing that you'll have to sign the sticker and supervise me while I'm checking it over?"

"That's the drill, come over here and help me get it out of the bag, I'll fill in my details while you start doing your thing."

"Okay." She pulled her purple crime-scene gloves out of their pocket on her belt and snapped them on as Neal slid his long fingers into a pair made of white cotton and helped her heft the artwork away from the wall.

The pair of them extracted the metre-wide landscape from its' plastic packaging, setting it down on the steel table in the center of the space. Neal opened up his tool box, pulling out a few magnifying glasses of various strengths, a scalpel and some specimen jars, and a multi-setting flash-light that was capable of projecting waves from ultraviolet to infrared. He also extracted a pair of goggles with interchangeable lenses, from polarized clear glass to different colored lenses to allow a different viewpoint of the artwork.

"Can we flip it over? I want to get it out of the frame. Depending on how much the canvas was stretched, there might be evidence on the edges."

"Sure." Kate helped him, they flipped the painting and he handed her a pair of pliers.

"We're pulling it to pieces? Seriously?"

"Well, the CSU dusted for prints already, yeah?" Neal pointed to the smattering of black and grey dust that was now infiltrating his suit, settling on the table around the edges of the painting.

"Oh, okay, I guess."

"You can dust the edges of the canvas once we get the frame off, if you like. But I doubt that anyone with skills like this would have touched the canvas with bare hands at any point."

"I'm still checking it."

"I know." They began extracting the nails from the backing board, removing it from the back of the frame. Neal set the backing board aside and Kate stepped over to the store cupboard, pulling out a pair of dusting brushes and two pots of powder.

"Let's get to it."

Two hours later they had finished a thorough examination of the painting, under different light conditions, through different lenses and Neal had taken samples of the paint, canvas and even managed to extract a couple of brush hairs from the center of the work. Kate had labeled the specimen jars and put them into an evidence bag to be taken to the FBI's lab for analysis, while Neal took high-resolution photos of the piece, printing a couple for the evidence team and keeping one for himself, to give to Mozzie. Maybe the forgeries were being painted on commission, and the forger himself had nothing to do with the killings or robberies.

"Are we done?" Beckett asked, snapping her gloves off and tossing them into the bin in the corner.

"Looks like it."  
"Alright, can you call Peter and ask him to meet us at the FBI lab? We need to go and speak to Mrs Peterson."


End file.
